Terje Rypdal is the Norwegian guitarist's first album under his own name for ECM, recorded in Oslo in August 1971 and released that November as ECM 1016. It brings together musicians from the label's early Oslo sessions and pushes their language toward electric jazz, orchestral colour and long, slowly built atmospheres. Five Rypdal compositions run from a smoky twelve-minute opener to a suite of more than fifteen minutes with voice and English horn.
Terje Rypdal had first appeared on ECM a year earlier, as guitarist of the Jan Garbarek Quartet on Afric Pepperbird, recorded at the same studio in September 1970. Garbarek returns here on tenor saxophone, flute and clarinet, and so does the rhythm section of that record, Arild Andersen on bass and Jon Christensen on percussion. Singer Inger Lise Rypdal, an oboist doubling on English horn, two electric pianists and a second bassist enlarge the group from piece to piece. Manfred Eicher produced the sessions at Arne Bendiksen Studio, with Jan Erik Kongshaug as engineer.
The opener, Keep It Like That - Tight, settles into a dim late-night groove in which a long Garbarek solo is eventually overtaken by Rypdal's guitar. Rainbow turns away from jazz toward a reverberant, almost classical stillness, led by oboe over bowed electric bass, flute and scattered percussion. Electric Fantasy, the centrepiece, is a suite of symphonic breadth in which voice and English horn sit over Christensen's drumming and occasional wah-wah guitar. The short ambient Lontano II leads straight into Tough Enough, which closes the album on a grittier, bluesier note.
The changes of instrumentation between tracks are part of the record's character, and the album sounds less like a band date than a composer's first portfolio. Writing on ECM Reviews, Tyran Grillo heard the opener as a piece of film noir atmosphere and called Rainbow "a most ethereal track laden with reverb and stratospheric beauty". He found the whole album "thematically rich and more than worth the listen", while noting that the shifting line-up might put some listeners off.
This CD is the 2020 reissue in ECM's Touchstones series, which brings key albums from the label's catalogue back into circulation in card sleeves. The album was first released in 1971 as ECM 1016.
